This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
